Found out that the Realtek daughter-board needed the Realtek 8168 driver package from ESXi 5.1/5.0, the LSI 9650SE also is an async driver which means I have to load it into the ISO or afterwards as well. After creating a new ISO including the new Realtek drivers and the LSI raid driver, I managed to get the NICs working but the RAID card wasn’t detected still… Actually, the RAID card was shipped and I figured maybe the battery was dead or something wasn’t letting it detect properly. After 24 hours of letting it sit in the desktop with the power cord connected (still off) it was detected but didn’t load anything properly (no drives). After some tinkering I managed to get the RAID drivers loaded, had to load a newer aacraid driver in addition to the LSI drivers.

Later I found out, that the drives weren’t being detected properly as they showed as 746GB drives. I thought it was weird so I put in a WD 3TB drive that was known for sure to be compatible (although I found someone using the Seagates), but it was the same. I realized I had misread the firmware number and I had one just before the 2TB+ compatibility, so I had to update the firmware to FE9X 4.10.00.027 to work. All detected A-OK.

Configure RAID card
1) Ensure firmware 4.10.00.024 (FE9X 4.10.00.027 is what I used) or higher is installed on the RAID card
2) Create your array, or configure single drives to use windows to create an array
* Note: there are two ways to configure the array, one is through the RAID cards bootloader but you need to be in BIOS mode the other way is through the 3DM2 interface.